The case of the missing toilets

43 per cent of the toilets built by the Government in rural India are missing or defunct.

Making India open defecation-free has been a promise of sanitation drives in the country for at least 15 years. But latest statistics suggest that taxpayers' money spent through the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation to tackle this menace has by and large been flushed down non-existent toilets. Data from the 2011 census suggests that over two-third of rural Indians do not have access to individual household latrines (IHHL). Even the latest baseline survey undertaken by the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation found that about 60 per cent of rural India did not have access to household latrines.

The Central government has been funding the construction of rural toilets since 1999. But of the 97.3 million toilets that it claims to have built, the ministry's 2012 survey suggests that at least 27.64 million toilets are unaccounted for, and an additional 14.15 million are defunct. In other words, while the money spent on more than 41.79 million toilets may have helped achieve "targets" in government files, it has failed to fulfil its objective. "The truth is that some of these toilets are being used as godowns," Union Rural Development Minister Nitin Gadkari admitted at a conference of state ministers on August 25, in which they helped draw the contours of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ambitious new Swachh Bharat mission.

The outcome of this shortfall is reflected in the villages across the country. Take the case of Nirmalvigaha village in Bihar's Nawada district. About 1,400 households of this village are forced to defecate in the open because none of them, barring the families of the village chief and two of his supporters, have access to toilets. "Toilets had been constructed by the Government in around 100 Dalit households, but they could not stand even for 100 days," says 65-year-old Tanik Manjhi, a local resident. "There were no roofs, no doors. The depth of the toilets was merely two to three feet. The walls were so weak that they could not survive the first rainfall."

The government estimates that about 111 million new IHHLs will have to be constructed within next five years to meet the anti-open defecation targets set in the Swachh Bharat mission, and the ministry has already identified about 88.4 million households eligible for support during this period for the construction of toilets. This translates into the construction of 177 lakh government funded toilets each year for next five years to meet October 2, 2019 deadline. A target that can be achieved only if the Government builds toilets at an astronomical rate of about 50,000 per day. Since the urban development ministry wants to construct an additional 1.04 crore toilets for urban households across over 4,000 statutory towns, the number goes up even further. To put the current requirement of 177 lakh toilets per year in perspective, the Government had added only 50 lakh IHHLs in rural India the last fiscal. The record for the highest number of toilets built in one year was 124 lakh in 2009-10-still way below the revised target.

With Rs 12,000 promised as construction support for each of these toilets, if implemented properly, the Swachh Bharat mission in rural areas alone will cost the Government about Rs 1 lakh crore over the next five years. Of this, Rs 75,000 crore will have to be borne by the Central government while the remaining would be shared between state governments. For urban India, the Cabinet has estimated an additional expenditure of over Rs 62,000 crore in the next five years, the bulk of it to be borne by state governments through private-public partnerships.

Apart from infrastructure support, the Swachh Bharat mission is also hoping to trigger a behavioural change among Indians towards sanitation. The Government wants to start a citizens' movement to change the mindset towards cleanliness and open defecation. "The idea," says an official working on the project, "is to invoke shame and disgust among villagers to create a demand for functional toilets. Only then can India become swachh by 2019." But, even if this peoples' movement is successful, the million-dollar question remains: will there be enough toilets to make the dream a reality?